Pirate Bay: Swedish prosecutors keen to seize two key domains

Swedish authorities are keen to seize two of the Pirate Bay's key domain names and are accusing a domain register of being an accomplice to copyright law breachesCC

Following their raid on the Pirate Bay in December, Swedish authorities are now determined to seize two of the Pirate Bay's key domain names, and are accusing a domain registrar of being an accomplice to copyright law breaches.

On 10 December, Stockholm County Police raided a server room belonging to the notorious illegal BitTorrent file-sharing website, seizing its servers and other equipment due to a complaint from a Swedish anti-piracy group.

Now the same prosecutor who was involved in the raid, Frank Ingblad, has told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that the domains "piratebay.se" and "thepiratebay.se" should be placed under state control or even cancelled.

"A domain name is an aid for a site. When the site is used for criminal activities, as such a domain name is an aid to a crime," he said, translated from Swedish.

"It is not our intention to impose any monitoring responsibility on the internet infrastructure foundation. The best outcome would be for the state to take over the domain."

The internet infrastructure foundation in Sweden goes by the name Punkt SE, and it is responsible for Sweden's top level .SE domain.

In Sweden, it is not uncommon for action to be taken against domain names, but this is the first time that a prosecutor has directly targeted a domain registrar.

"There have been two legal cases regarding forfeiture of domain names from the domain name holder (ikonm.se and [torrent site] xnt.nu). In the Pirate Bay case the prosecutor wants to forfeit the domain names directly from .SE," Punkt SE's Maria Ekelund told TorrentFreak.

The original founders of Pirate Bay have long since been found guilty of assisting its site users in carrying out copyright infringement.

In the current case, which will be heard at the end of April however, the prosecutor is accusing Punkt SE of assisting individuals who have previously been found guilty of aiding people in committing copyright infringement.

"In the eyes of the prosecutor, .SE's catalogue function has become some form of accomplice to criminal activity, a perspective that is unique in Europe as far as I know," Punkt SE CEO Danny Aertstold TorrentFreak.

"There are no previous cases of states suing a registry for abetting criminal activity or breaching copyright law."

Is there a case against the domain registrar?

Peter Sunde, one of the original founders of the Pirate Bay, who was released from prison in November, has written an op-ed for TorrentFreak about the current case.

"[The prosecutors] look at it as removing a street address on the basis that a crime was committed there," he wrote.

"But they're all making it so simple. The fact is that, even though I despise the current version of The Pirate Bay, nothing illegal happens there. And actually, no such case has even been tried as the case against me and the others a few years back was about a totally different version of TPB."

Sunde went on to explain that the original Pirate Bay consisted of a search engine, a tracking system and a database of .torrent files, and that those three things were the basis of the charges against him and his co-founders.

Since the latest version of the Pirate Bay is no longer run on this infrastructure, Sunde argued that the new case is not valid.

"Essentially today's TPB is similar to any other search engine. The court case in Sweden could just as well talk about Google.se as a domain name instead, since they also link to material that might breach copyright. But, actually, Google show you parts of that content, not just metadata about it," he stressed.

"Obviously this would be considered a ludicrous case and would be thrown out, but everything regarding TPB scared the shit out of the Swedish government because of pressure from the United States of America."